My Lords, I return to the subject of grammar schools with two modest amendments, which I am sure the noble Baroness will wish to accept. I have always taken particular interest in grammar schools, having been brought up in an environment of selective education. This was compounded by direct experience of the failure of the Buckinghamshire education system through my eldest daughter, who had the misfortune to be living there for her secondary education and attending a secondary modern school. More generally, I recoil still at a system which essentially labels the majority of 11 year-olds as failures.
The move against grammar schools was supported hugely by parents when it happened. I was genuinely concerned when I saw Sir Graham Brady MP recently suggesting that, when this Bill goes back to the Commons, it should be amended to remove the statutory ban on new selective schools. We know he has received support from other Conservative Members of Parliament. I say to the Minister that if the Bill comes back amended in that way, we will fight it tooth and nail in your Lordships’ House, and will expect at least a day to debate it.
My two amendments are very modest and address issues relating to the 1998 legislation. It was introduced in good faith but, as time goes on, one sees that it needs to be improved, and this is what I am seeking to do here. I have some experience in this. In Birmingham, the local authority where I live, my wife was a leading member of the campaign to use the legislation to allow a ballot to remove selection from the eight grammar schools in the city. She and others discovered that, under the legislation, only parents in primary schools which have sent five or more children to grammar schools in the last three consecutive years were allowed to vote, thus denying parents in other schools the franchise.
Of course, the schools denied the franchise were predominantly schools with higher levels of free school meals, and those that got the franchise were in the most prosperous neighbourhoods. That is not surprising, as data shows that it is predominately middle-class children, whose parents have the money to pay for private tuition, who pass the grammar school exam. This is not a meritocracy, as is sometimes claimed by Conservative MPs, but a bought privilege for those with money.
In my two amendments, I first want to reduce the 20% of qualifying voters to 10%. That is the same as is required for the recall of an MP. It is not unreasonable to set the level there. When the legislation was introduced in 1998, we were run on paper as a country; we know the world has changed. So secondly, I am suggesting
that we allow electronic communications in relation to regulations. I know from the meeting I had with the Minister this morning that, because of the academy grammar schools, there will be new regulations. I ask that this be considered as part of the revision of those regulations.
My other two amendments in this group, Amendments 102 and 103, are on a completely different matter. They are about strengthening the rights of parents and increasing the public accountability of schools. Given the development of the admissions system around academies, instead of what previously was a unified system where the local authority provided all the information and you went through the local authority system, a parent can often be faced with a multitude of applications to academies in their area. It can be very confusing. I propose a straightforward extension to the existing remit of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. I want to enable parents to seek an independent investigation into complaints about admissions to academies if they think their child has been wrongly denied access to their preferred choice of school. The other amendment proposes an equally practical, but perhaps even more important, extension to the rights of parents: the right to complain about what goes on within the school itself.
In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, in response raised five points to justify rejecting those amendments: that there was a route for complaints through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator; that the School Admissions Code has improved the process for managing in-year admissions; that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child; that every academy trust must have a published complaints procedure; and, finally, that her department provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools.
I am very grateful for the Minister’s full response but it does not go far enough. For instance, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator does not make decisions on individual complaints about the admissions appeal process. On the School Admissions Code, although the changes that were made are welcome, they do not in any way address the lack of independent redress for school admissions for academies and free schools or the underlying fragmentation of the admissions complaints system for parents. On the new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools, I would just say that powers of direction are not a substitute for parental access to an independent appeals and complaints process. Finally, on complaints directly to her department, my understanding is that her department focuses on whether a school has followed the complaints process, rather than carrying out a fresh investigation into the substantive matter complained about. I hope that the Minister will give some consideration to that.
All schools are going to become academies. The Minister’s previous arguments about wishing to maintain the freedom of academies has to be balanced with a proper accountability system. I wonder whether the review she is chairing might look at this. It seems to me that one key element of allowing academies to continue
to have the freedoms that they enjoy is that there are some safeguards in the system. I would argue that having the Local Government Ombudsman as a backdrop would be one of the building blocks to allowing academies to continue to have their freedoms.
Having said that, I hope we can give these and other amendments a fair wind. I beg to move.